The extraordinary expansion of higher education throughout the world in the first decades after World War II, and the prominent place that instruction in history occupied in colleges and universities, contributed to the dramatic growth in the historical profession in the second half of the 20th century. This in turn reflected a widespread public interest in—indeed, a fascination with—the past.
In the countries that fought in the war, especially the United States, returning veterans were given access to higher education. This created a mass market for teachers of history, again, especially in the United States, where it became common to inculcate in first-year students, under the rubric of “general education,” courses in “Western civilization.” (This was quickly and appropriately nicknamed “Plato to NATO”; its premise was that there was a continuous and relatively coherent Western tradition beginning in classical Greece and mutually enjoyed by the countries that happened to be members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.) With so many more people studying history, publishers in the English speaking world began to produce cheap paperback editions even of historical monographs, making it possible for the first time to introduce undergraduates to real historical writing.
Borne on this tide were the graduate schools, which expanded their faculties and admitted Ph.D. candidates in numbers not seen before. Good doctoral dissertations (and even some bad ones) could attract the interest of publishers, and their authors usually had some choice of permanent employment. The buoyant publishing climate also encouraged historical journals to proliferate. None matched the impact of the Annales, but they often moved to the cutting edge of historical work. Past and Present was founded in 1952 at the University of Oxford with the provocative (but short-lived) subtitle “A Journal of Scientific History.” Although committed to social history and drawing mainly on left-wing contributors, the journal never followed any rigid ideological line, and it quickly became the outstanding historical journal in English, rivaling the staid and traditional English Historical Review (founded 1885). Similar interests were addressed by Comparative Studies in Society and History (founded 1958) and the Journal of Interdisciplinary History (founded 1970), while History and Theory (founded 1960) became the first journal devoted to the theory of history. Branches of history History of the arts
Histories have been written about architecture, sculpture, painting, music, dance, theatre, motion pictures, television, and literature. Despite essential differences, these forms of historiography have some common features. One is that they are almost invariably produced outside history departments and faculties. For this reason they have tended to be regarded as somewhat exotic specialties. Because the activities of artists are inevitably the central subject of most histories of the arts, such histories generally include formalistic analyses of artistic works. The distinction between history and philosophy in the case of art is thus less distinct than it is in other subject areas. Finally, performance traditions figure prominently in histories of music, dance, and theatre.
Historians are seldom satisfied with purely formal analyses of art and are seldom competent to make them. Historians have tried to integrate art history into their studies in three fundamental ways. The first is to consider the material conditions of production. Some of the issues are technicaclass="underline" what pigments were available to an artist? What special effects were possible in an Elizabethan theatre? Others relate to patronage, since most artists have always worked for commissions or pensions given to them by the rich (who in return got to appear in paintings, be mentioned in the prefaces of books, or attach their names to pieces of music). Finally, the working conditions and social status of artists have been investigated. Artists in past centuries had little social prestige; they were regarded as artisans and were organized in guild workshops with apprentices (or sons—Bach in Germany was almost a generic name for a musician).
A second approach, which became popular in the late 20th century, is to shift the emphasis from the artist to the audience. German literary critics carried this conception farthest in what they called Rezeptionstheorie. Applied to a work of literature, Rezeptionstheorie implies that the meaning of a work is determined not by the writer but by the reader, who is “implied” in the text. Sometimes scholars simply treat themselves as “the reader,” thus producing literary criticism rather than history. Occasionally, however, there is evidence of how ordinary readers reacted to novels (e.g., when readers wrote to magazines in which novels were serialized). The face-to-face nature of the performing arts makes it easier to determine how audiences responded to such works; there are famous stories of the disastrous premieres of Georges Bizet’s opera Carmen or Giuseppe Verdi’s La traviata and of the riot that erupted at the first performance of the ballet Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring), by Igor Stravinsky and Serge Diaghilev. Reception theory has been particularly fruitful in the field of history of the moving image, since sophisticated means of measuring and evaluating audience responses are available (and, in television at least, slavishly followed).
The most ambitious—and most controversial—way of integrating art history into historiography relies on such notions as a zeitgeist, or spirit of an age. The originator of this approach was Jacob Burckhardt (1818–97), whose masterpiece, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, begins with a chapter called “The State as a Work of Art” and argues that artistic production in the Renaissance is of a piece with politics and statecraft. Giambattista Vico’s idea of the poetic tropes of an age of heroes, as contrasted with the prose of an age of irony, points in the same direction, as does G.W.F. Hegel’s conception of Spirit coming to full self-consciousness through art, religion, and philosophy.
The history of painting has gained the most attention from scholars in part because paintings are traded commodities that often require authentication by experts. The authentication of modern paintings seldom requires the services of a professional historian, but works from previous centuries, especially those in which the cult of the individual artistic genius had not fully developed and paintings were not always signed, often do. One of the great art historians of the early 20th century, Bernard Berenson (1865–1959), borrowed a technique for attributions that depended on mannerisms of painting ears and noses, but he also overestimated his ability to identify paintings by the Italian Renaissance master Giorgione and others, incidentally making large sums for himself. In the late 20th century, art historians developed more-rigorous criteria for attribution, with the result that works once attributed to great artists such as Giorgione were demoted to “school of,” “follower of,” and the like. Art history is thus a field in which detecting forgeries is still a live issue. One of the great forgers of the 20th century, Hans van Meegeren, succeeded in passing off a number of his own canvases as works of the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer.